Epilogue
Discours de la méthode
So we did it again. My friend Lev couldn’t stop trying to explain, and so he ended his discourse on war and peace with more pages of redundant explanation than anyone would care to read. He’d already said it all in the previous thousand pages, as did I before my last and longest chapter here. But, in his epilogue, Lev didn’t mention his ordinary people. I shall, because that’s all we are, ordinary people, alien or not.
That bears repeating, and trying to foster fair-sharing has been my method, through all my life of strife and ease. I don’t mean I’ve chosen that mission as mine, but rather that it’s fallen upon me through the grace of the same cause that gives you your opportunities and obstructions. So choices still compel me, noisily and quietly.
For example, if I have to pick a side, I’ll pick Moses against Joshua. But, if Hitler were to rise from his grave and repent to stand beside Rachel Corrie, I’d welcome him and stand with both. And, if Rachel were to rise from her grave and stand beside Hitler to avenge herself against Israel, I’d leave her alone in that insanity. That comes from rationality I can’t deny, although it’s often denied and decried on Earth.
Another biblical fact is that the great direct ancestor of Jesus who wrote the Psalms sent a man to die in battle so he could commit adultery with the man’s wife. Another historical fact is that the man called the father of the nation that calls itself the land of the free, and the principal author of the declaration of that nation’s freedom, each owned hundreds of slaves. And yes they knew full well what they were doing.
George Washington willed that, on the death of his wife, all his slaves be freed. And Martha freed them before her death, for fear that they would cause her death for their freedom. Thomas Jefferson said that the slaves of his nation would not forever tolerate slavery, that someday they would declare their independence, as had he. He said that someday they too would “rise from the dust.”
But did you recognize that I misrepresented a biblical fact? According to the Bible, King David was not an ancestor of Jesus but rather of carpenter Joseph, who married Mary, Jesus’ mother. Another biblical fact is that the Bible says nothing of Mary’s genealogy, although she and God are the only direct ancestors of Christ it mentions. Do you love your mother, your sister?
Your daughter, your wife? Another biblical fact is that a Samaritan was good. Another historical fact is that Samaritans are Palestinians. Another biblical fact is that God said he would go before the Israelites and destroy all Canaanites. Another historical fact is that many Samaritans are nevertheless alive now, although not very happily.
So most of us male Earthlings still strive to keep women red or yellow or black or white or Semitic in our dust, as most of us pale Earthlings still strive to keep our colorful neighbors African or Semitic, Jewish or Islamic, in our dust. We still call dirt anything we don’t find to fit our place, and we wallow in that dust.
In the third year, of the third millennium, after the birth of Christ.
But maybe I’m wrong in my reasoning, and maybe I’m just maudlin.
Maybe, in the deepest shadows of the hearts of men and women, lurks bloodlust. Maybe that’s the ultimate Jungian archetype, and so maybe killing Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein is more important to humans than the happiness of other humans. I, the author of this fiction, lived the last half of the last century of the last past millennium, and I spent years in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Yet I have never heard until this millennium the word “kill” mentioned so often. And that mentioning, on the news and in our homes, is for the killing. Are we closing evil or opening it? What’s your opinion?
If I’m wrong about how things seem to me, if I’m wrong in my suspicion that humans are at heart noble and loving, why do people bother to say they prefer peace to war? Are we just hypocritical bigots, nothing better? What’s in your heart?
While Billy the Kid worked for l’amore de Santa Clara, Charismatic lost the triple-crown by breaking one of his three-year-old legs at the finish-line for the Belmont Stakes. Belmont means beautiful mountain, and the horse was a lovely chestnut.
Billy took to work the Boston Globe’s picture of that horse as an Hispanic groom tried to comfort him while the jockey held his broken leg. So, after September 11, when War Emblem looked like a promise to win the triple-crown, Billy felt a compulsion to see the race and traveled to Belmont Park for the purpose, for all all meant.
Commerce, being what it is, left a clubhouse seat the cheapest he could buy, and he found himself sitting beside movie stars and a winner of the Silver Star in World War II, whose name is Charlie. Sitting beside Charlie was his nephew who heads a company that electronically stores other companies’ data, in China.
Sitting in front of Billy was a woman in a straw hat and an elegant suit, like for an Easter parade, or a mint julep. Above the sunlight reflecting from the grass track inside the dust one for the main race, she leafed through a magazine.
“Excuse me,” said Billy, tapping one of her elegant shoulders. “Was that Freud?”
She flipped back the page to the picture that had caught Billy’s attention.
“Yes,” she said, from eyes surely more elegant than any analysis of any dreams.
“Why do you just look at the pictures and not read the articles,” Billy asked her.
The man beside her showed no sense that any of that had happened there.
“I read the articles,” she said offended, and Billy found himself deeply ashamed.
The movie stars were Bruce Willis and Dennis Quaid and John Goodman. The only woman with the three of them was John Goodman’s wife, Annabeth Hartzog. When Billy referred to her as John’s girlfriend, John said she was his wife. He said he didn’t know or care about horses. He said he was there for her, his wife.
Billy drank too much beer and lost attention to the racing. War Emblem stumbled or was bumped at the starting-gate and lost the race after gaining the lead near the end but running out of wind. Not long after, the Arabian prince who owned War Emblem died of questionable causes, and a movie about Sea Biscuit was a hit. Who’d ‘a’ thunk?
But, as we all know, nothing’s personal. Bruce Willis starred in a movie about a dead child who sees dead people wherever he looks and says so to the Bruce Willis character, who’s dead but doesn’t know it. Dennis Quaid starred in a movie purportedly about New Orleans that portrayed swings for children outside Huey Long’s Charity Hospital where no ground’s left for grass, and Goodman played the kingfish on TV.
But, as another story goes, Dennis Quaid put in words when Annabeth rejected John at a party. And, as this story is, she took John to that race, dressed ready to assist in an operating room. You know those blue clothes, sometimes called scrubs.
“Do you work for a hospital?” Billy asked her.
“No,” she said. “I don’t work for a hospital.”
Goodman, as Billy looked to hear, said to Quaid something about someone’s speaking of evil. Billy wondered about his own evil against the evil ranchers and about whether anyone would ever make a movie to tell the story of the movement from Storyville through the projects to the concrete corrosion that Charity hospital has become, whatever the intentions of the assassinated governor.
Then, as Billy thought about Young Goodman Brown, wondering whether the kingfish was an evil corruption or a saintly martyr or only an ordinary person, John took Annabeth into the clubhouse and bought her a sweatshirt to wear in the afternoon, chilling as the evening race approached. One must recall.
My faith is not gone. She lies lightly in the windy sands of the Sahara and in the rainy forests of the Amazon, in the mists of Avalon and in the azure sky. My faith rides with snorting camels and neighing horses, in Rachel’s well and thousands of Arabian nights. My faith may dream but never lies at all.
Billy left at the track field-glasses he had borrowed from a client of l’amore de Santa Clara and loaned to Willis. When he realized the loss, he was drinking a beer in a bar on Manhattan called The Playwright, while awaiting his bus back to Boston. He told the bartender that Bruce Willis had his field-glasses, and the bartender told him he’d have to leave after finishing that beer. Charlie returned the field-glasses by mail and left Billy a message on his voicemail at L’Amore de Santa Clara, saying Billy was a sweetheart. Willis had been a bartender, and the next triple-crown prospect was a gelding.
How many paths can we find to follow to the mountaintop, and what is a mountaintop? Everest isn’t very far up from Katmandu, which is as famous for drugs as is Tangier in the country of Casablanca. Play it again, Satchmo?
The kid Billy sent notes to all those clubhouse names he knew, asking them to send some money for l’amore de Santa Clara. None of them sent money, not the movie stars and not the Silver Star winner and not the data-storer, and Billy figured it was because he’d drank too much beer, and so failed to impress them.
But maybe, he also thought, they knew better than to donate to the corruption at L’Amore de Santa Clara, or to a cause of Billy the Kid. Billy was certain that John and Annabeth would give proper consideration, but he was also certain that consideration of charity is full of complexity, in the realm of human reason.
“Charity begins at home,” said my mother. “You ain’t so muckin’ fuch.”
Maybe it was an omen, someone named for the mothers of Mary and John the Baptist taking someone named John Goodman to see a horse named War Emblem lose a race. Maybe everything is an omen. Maybe nothing is.
Cher did! Who’s Cher? What’s Cher? Cher isn’t even a name! All it is is an adjective for what she did. She stayed at the new Ritz-Carlton in Boston, which shares its back wall with L’Amore de Santa Clara. She walked around the block and saw l’amore de Santa Clara, and she kicked up $5000 to the cause, because.
Rockefeller Center. Was Junior Rockefeller fundamentally good for commissioning Diego Rivera to paint that mural, or was he fundamentally bad for destroying it because Rivera included in it a portrait of Lenin, or vice versa? Can conventional concepts be correct, that Israelis are better than Palestinians, that white is better than black, or vice versa? Is the glass half full, or is the glass half empty, or is it just the feeling in your heart, or is it just a matter of opinion?
Do reason and knowledge or fairness and justice have nothing to do with it? Do we have free will by our reasoning, or does God just throw us to prejudice he creates for us? Does God want us to cut off the hands of thieves, or to teach them something better to do with their hands? Does sense deserve to be plain, or should we try to obfuscate it? Can sense stand to be common, or must it be elite? Can we deal with truth?
Either or any way, in any of those questions, be it by brain-baking or be it by soul-searching, it seems to me that humanity in general severely needs a shift of attitude, but that’s not my opinion. It also seems to me that, just as partisanship is inherently bigotry, opinions are inherently prejudice. Might not discovering a fact you hadn’t known change your opinion, and maybe your party? If not, how not?
I love the Rockettes. But that’s not an opinion. It’s a fact of my heart, and my only opinion is that opinions are no better than the facts that support them, and it seems to me that facts in matters of my heart I’ve presented here bear and despair of attention. Yet, still, that’s not my opinion, only a personal offering. But I’ve tried to keep it from being empty of facts. It follows some fact-seeking, finding or not.
Above are fiction and facts and myth.
Below are facts and closing questions.
For the first Easter after that infamous September 11, I visited the Holy Land. Walking in Bethlehem to the Church of the Nativity beneath Israeli snipers, I saw a Palestinian child playing in a shot-out car, pretending to drive. Also on that visit, amid the wildflowers atop the Mount of Beatitudes, gazing through the mist above the Sea of Galilee, where we’re told Peter sank like a rock for lack of faith, I saw no other human. Where were all the Christians? Hiding under a bushel?
On the way there, on a public bus from Tiberius, the Roman city named after that Roman emperor as is the sea now, I asked the bus-driver to tell me when I had arrived. That pistol-packing bus-driver didn’t speak English, the language most famous for cowboys and imperialism, but a young female Israeli soldier boarding behind me interpreted, and she sat beside me and made sure I knew where to get out. Of the many Israeli soldiers I saw riding buses on that little voyage of mine, she was one of the few not carrying a weapon. I, at least, love that young woman, as I love Rosa Parks.
Journalists at the church wore flak-vests and helmets. I wore a T-shirt given me for helping with a Project Bread Walk for Hunger: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.” But I’ve given up on going to church, for having to ask there the same question: Where, on Earth, are any Christians? So I wrote this book, after Rachel wrote this:
I have been in Palestine for two weeks and one hour now, and I still have very few words to describe what I see. It is most difficult for me to think about what's going on here when I sit down to write back to the United States, something about the virtual portal into luxury. I don't know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons. I think, although I'm not entirely sure, that even the smallest of these children understand that life is not like this everywhere. An eight-year-old was shot and killed by an Israeli tank two days before I got here, and many of the children murmur his name to me, ?Ali?
I wish to see if facts can be as evident to humans as opinions.
I wish to see if myth can prove its truth.
I hope for happiness.
In Jefferson’s historical declaration, presumably presuming to speak for all men and women, he said: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Nothing. Nothing on this earth. Nothing on Earth is worse than bigotry, and bigotry cannot exist without hypocrisy. We proclaim against bigotry in our political speeches and weep at it as we eat popcorn in movie theatres. Then we kick the dust from our feet. We open our checkbooks. We forget.
“And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking . . . . And the people stood afar off, and Moses drew unto the thick darkness where God was.” From that thick smoke came the Commandments! How fear?
You might rightly say that it is not factual that the Ten Commandments came out of that smoke as James Stuart’s Oxford scholars said they did. But you cannot honestly deny that every separate ideology humans broadly call religion works to kill the rest of their neighbors.
When the young man stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese driver stopped. When the young woman stood in front of the bulldozer in a Palestinian neighborhood, the Israeli driver crushed her! What, exactly, do we mean by God?
Simple question: Whatever means you think you command, do you think you are as happy as Rosa Parks was with her family in Pine Level? That is, do you think you’re on a path to happiness, by way of primroses or anything else?
On September 11, in the first year of this millennium, television broadcasts showed people fleeing what looked like billowing smoke. The pictures looked like they were from a disaster movie.
They were, moving pictures of disaster. But it wasn’t smoke, and it wasn’t ashes. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
It was dust! Where is the love? S’il vous plait.
One More Beginning
“although I’m not entirely sure”